Wednesday, December 25, 2013

So, yeah, that all happened. I still remember watching news reports of the 1998 ice storm, people without power for weeks and transmission towers buckling under the strain of all that ice; while Toronto wasn't hitquite as badly, it's a purely academic distinction for the seventy thousand homes that are still without power, nearly four days after the first outages. I may still be one of them; my apartment complex, along with pretty much the entirety of East York south of the Don Valley, lost power at 11 PM on Saturday night.It'll be ages putting this all back together, and all those snapping trees are going to echo well into the future.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Last weekend, the Toronto Transit Commission held an open house up at its Hillcrest Complex; the Harvey Shops, the main maintenance base for the city's streetcar fleet, was thrown open for a morning and afternoon amid the first significant snowfall of the season for people to come and gawk around at. I didn't notice the brightly yellow cast of the lights while I was there, but the camera lens captured it well enough. Here, you can see five streetcars in various stages of maintenance--they've been running for more than thirty years now, and they've well outlived their warranties.

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Thursday, November 7, 2013

Today, I break my silence not for commentary about Rob Ford--I mean, christ, what could I even say at this point--but for a personal announcement of the writing variety. My story "Three Years of Ashes and Twenty Years of Dust" will be appearing in the Strange Bedfellows anthology by Bundoran Press, which will be slamming into retail in both physical and electronic versions come April 2014. I'm one of two Canadians represented among the eighteen stories that will be included, and I think that's pretty neat.The story itself also has got a damn long title that might be changed--the official Table of Contents announcement, which you can see here, has it as "Three Years of Ash, Twenty Years of Dust." To be fair, the title was pretty much the last thing I came up with; all through the writing process it had the hugely inspirational working title "Vesta."Also, that Gustavo Bondoni guy... he also had a story in Return to Luna, which is my most recent anthology credit, way back in 2008. I think he's following me...

Monday, September 30, 2013

It's been nearly a month since Worldcon flared to brief and blazing life down in Texas over this past Labour Day weekend, but it feels like it took weeks for the echoes to start settling down. You may have heard about it in blogs or Twitter in connection with renewed concerns over the greying of the membership and the ongoing problems with diversity in the science fiction and fantasy field. if not, well, you might as well start off here!What's Worldcon? It's the World Science Fiction Convention, held yearly since 1939 except for 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 due to some unfortunate unpleasantness, and was historically the big get-together of the science fiction and fantasy community--though history tends to give way to the future, which is the source of so many of its present issues. Unlike other major conventions like Dragon Con or San Diego Comic Con or so on, Worldcon doesn't put down roots; it's a roving convention that hops from city to city every year. In 2012 it was in Chicago, in 2014 it will be in London, and so on. Despite the name, which was coined out of analogy with the 1939 World's Fair in New York, most have been held in the United States. This one was held in San Antonio, Texas, at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center and the Marriott Rivercenter and Riverwalk hotels.What'll you find at Worldcon? A goodly number of people, for one--while it isn't the tens of thousands that you'll find at Dragon Con or the major comic conventions, over the past couple of decades Worldcons have settled into a steady attendance of three to four thousand. It's enough for the convention to be busy, with multiple program items running concurrently from morning to evening, but not so crowded that it's impossible to do anything but stake out a spot in a line and hope for the best. What you won't find at Worldcon is a strong media presence. Sure, there are panels here and there, but the overwhelming focus is on the written world. There isn't much cosplay either. I never went to the masquerade, but through all the rest of the con, I encountered one person cosplaying as Vanellope from Wreck-It Ralph and that was it.Unless you count the guy with the remote-controlled K-9 and Dalek. But then they're not costumes, are they?

There was one major, inescapable presence at LoneStarCon 3, though--Texas itself. I knew what I was getting into from the first time I checked the San Antonio temperature charts, but there's a difference between knowing something and living it. I will say that the weather conditions in late August were tolerable, but only because every square inch of the convention space was air conditioned. On my longest trip outside of the conditioned air--a morning journey to the Alamo and back--I felt like the air had sucked every joule of energy out of me. The conditions were generally comparable to standing next to the heat exhaust of a transit bus. When I stepped out of the convention center it felt as if the hairs were being singed off my arms. One of the most important lessons I took away from LoneStarCon 3 is that I am not built for life in Texas.Nevertheless, LoneStarCon3 was a very Texas convention. To put it into perspective, there more than twice as many attendees from the Lone Star State as from the entire world outside of the United States. Granted, this is nothing new; generally speaking, wherever Worldcon lands, a substantial proportion of the membership is going to consist of people who live within a few hours' drive, and in San Antonio's case, "a few hours' drive" is Texas with a slice of northeastern Mexico. It was strongly evident in the program; aside from the launch of the new Rayguns Over Texas anthology, there were nearly twenty program items dealing with Texas in general, and a dozen dealing with Robert E. Howard specifically--that latter focus, incidentally, drew some heat on Twitter later, and seems to have come about because of a near-total lack of Howard-related programming at LoneStarCon 2 back in 1997.Though this does cut close to one of the issues Worldcon is wrestling with: the nature of the attendees. There are those who follow Worldcon from city to city, but due to the expenses inherent in airline tickets and hotel rooms, many of them tend to be either closely involved in the scene themselves--writers, editors, what have you--or people who've been going to Worldcons for decades, and have the free time and money necessary to do so. The expense issue alone excludes a lot of potential attendees; hell, if I'd have been aware of the existence of Worldcon back in university, when I was first starting out toward science fiction, the 2003 Worldcon in Toronto was the only one I could have even begun to consider attending, and that only because I was living in Toronto then. Going to San Jose or Boston or Glasgow or Yokohama as a broke-ass student? Forget about it, mangs.Now then, on with the meat of it.In retrospect, the first panel I dropped into foreshadowed the whole "aging" question. Dangerous Visions: Are They Still Dangerous?, held on Thursday afternoon when attendees were still trickling into San Antonio International Airport, wore its subject in its title--Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions, published in 1967 to widespread acclaim, and followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972 and The Last Dangerous Visions in 1973197519761977197819801982198419902007bwahahahahahaha I'm just kidding, that thing is never coming out. If you've never heard of it, Dangerous Visions was an anthology intended to collect the sort of stories that couldn't be published anywhere else--or, at least, couldn't be published anywhere else in 1967. One of the included stories, Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels," arrived after having been rejected by Playboy--at the time, the highest-paying fiction market in the United States--and is entirely innocuous today. As I understand, it was dangerous because... it acknowledged the existence of cancer?In all, no surprise that this was focused in history. I suppose some might say that Worldcon's whole problem is that there's too much focus on history. Things were different in my first Friday panel, Schmoozing 101 with Mary Robinette Kowal, which unfolded in front of a full room. You'd think some of the things she went over--being able to find common ground in a conversation, not trapping people in a conversation, being physically pleasant through such innovations as bathing--would go without saying, but the sad truth is that they don't. One bit that stuck with me was her demonstration of the three types of movement, aggressive, passive, and regressive; a simple statement like "What did you say?" can have *vastly* different meanings if the speaker is leaning toward the subject, standing still, or recoiling.At the What-If Moments in History panel, presided over by panelists Vylar Kaftan, David Liss, Harry Turtledove, and Jo Walton, the audience filled the chairs and spilled out into standing room only. While a lot of the panel went over the same sort of things I've seen in alternate history panels before, I did find one of Jo Walton's statements intriguing: that is, the notion that AH is an "anti-providential" literature, and so inherently subversive because it undermines the notion that there is some kind of historical plan. Thinking about it now, that makes AH seem like the next great genre to be officially condemned in some authoritarian thought-control state. Perhaps I could get a plot out of that.I was also a bit flummoxed by the audience member who claimed that a major issue with AH is that we don't know how people in the past talked, acted, or looked like. It sure is a good thing writing and photography were finally invented in 2011, eh?I was also heartened by Harry Turtledove's assertion that using historical figures born after an alternate history's point of divergence--say, a story about Napoleon Bonaparte in a world where the Carthaginians crushed Rome to powder--is "cheating." I've been saying this all along! Honestly, though, it would be stronger if Turtledove was not guilty of that cheating himself.On Sunday, The Future Two Hundred Years Out likewise played to a full room, this one considerably bigger--it may be because Kim Stanley Robinson, one of 2013's Hugo nominees, was one of the panelists. He didn't mince his words on the panel, saying that "the Singularity is bullshit," with humans continuing to be the primary agents of history, and I can't help but lean toward his thinking. There wasn't much real disagreement from the other panelists on that; Joe Haldeman argued the Singularity to be a slow-motion convergence of technological and social trends that began around 1960 and will continue evolving for decades, for one. Other topics tackled here included the common failing of not taking social changes into account (N.B.: according to Sheila Williams, Asimov's does not see nearly enough examinations of the technological and social implications of technological advance, so get on that, writorbs), what will replace capitalism (nobody could really figure that out, though Robinson described present-day capitalism as "liquefied feudalism"), and that dystopias at their core all tell the same story: we can fuck up.It was the last panel I attended, though--Have We Lost the Future?--that I think put an endcap on the whole experience. In a way, it served as a bookend complementing the Dangerous Visions panel in its historical focus. About midway through, panelist Willie Siros made a statement that bowled me over, that the space age "came and went" in his lifetime. I suppose this is true if you define "space age" to mean "humans landing on Luna." In every other dimension, though, I think things have been accelerating, and the speed of change isn't letting up. As I write this, it's only been a few hours since I watched, live, the launch of a rocket from a webcam attached to its side as it left the atmosphere, built by a company whose CEO has made it clear that he intends to die on Mars. One of the Voyager probes has left the solar system. We've seen 4 Vesta up close and there discovered an equal to Olympus Mons. We have detected nearly one thousand exoplanets!The Space Age hasn't gone--it's barely even begun!Here, though, is another potential expression of Worldcon's age issue. The fresh new writers of today are young and of a world in which the lunar missions were all history. We didn't live through them. We didn't expect that they would just be the start and that there would be, say, boots on Mars by 2000. Although we share the science fiction field, our formative experiences are staggeringly different from those who entered the community in, say, the 50s through to the 70s. Likewise, it could be argued that science fiction is still figuring out its place in the cultural sphere--but that place may not necessarily be comfortable to those who were with it in the old days.What do I think the future holds? I'm not sure. Sooner or later, the cold equations of the actuarial tables demand that younger fans get involved in making Worldcon happen from year to year; the question is how many of those younger fans will be willing to? It's a different world now than it was thirty years ago. Things can change from Worldcon to Worldcon--in my personal experience, I had a good time in the gaming room at Chicon 7 last year, but when I went to the Night Gaming Room at LoneStarCon 3, I found a room with a few tables covered in sheets and absolutely nothing else.The question of what Worldcon would be in future years hung heavily over the Site Selection battle. For the first time in years, there was more than one site with an active bid: in fact Orlando, Spokane, and Helsinki all vied to host the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015. Parties rich in Finnish flavors rocked the Marriott Rivercenter to its foundations two nights in a row, and the Orlando team struggled valiantly for a convention that promised openness and low cost, for the price of holding it at Disney World during the height of hurricane season, but once the votes were counted it went to the one few had expected--Spokane, Washington.Personally, I'd expected the real fight to be between Helsinki and Orlando. However, since Worldcon Site Selection runs on Australian rules balloting--that is, you mark your choices 1, 2, and 3, the candidate with the least 1 votes gets knocked out and their voters' 2 votes redistributed, and so on--it became clear that there were two camps: the people who wanted a Worldcon in Helsinki, and the people who wanted Worldcon to stay in the United States. Helsinki got more #1 votes than anyone at first, but when Orlando was knocked out of the running, their voters broke for Spokane over Helsinki by nearly a 4 to 1 margin. What made it so heartbreaking was that Helsinki lost by thirty-five votes. THIRTY-FIVE!It doesn't surprise me, in retrospect--because Spokane always struck me as the "safe" bid. Helsinki offered the chance to bring Worldcon to an area of the world that had never had it before, and with the 2014 Worldcon being held in London, affored the opportunity for a European Worldcon fandom to arise. Orlando offered a revolutionary take on Worldcon, with low price and openness to new things, even if their latest bid artwork gave the impression they were looking to turn Worldcon into a mini-Dragon Con. Spokane... Spokane offered something unchallenging.I'm sure that Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, will still be a cool thing, and I've already paid for my membership. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that it says something about the Worldcon community that, when presented with options for the new and for revitalization, it went for the safe and the familiar.Previous Convention Reports

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Shock, horror, holy crap--it's a post that isn't a photo! Truth be told, I'm in the midst of rethinking how Acts of Minor Treason works; over the next couple of months I'm endeavoring to reinvent it as a more functional, WordPress-based site. For now, though, I have actual news to deliver!I'll be attending Can-Con 2013, an Ottawa-based speculative fiction convention, which runs from October 4th to 6th at the Minto Suite Hotel in Ottawa, Ontario and will see the presentation of the Prix Aurora Awards, Canada's highest sf honors. In a first for me, I won't be attending as just some guy as I have managed to finagle myself onto some panels!Friday, 8 PM to 9 PM - News and Fun from Worldcon - As I understand it, this will be a look at LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention, for those who weren't there and are curious about how a Worldcon goes.Saturday, 8 PM to 9 PM - You're Qualified for SFWA: Should You Join? - Once you know that SFWA is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an association of which I'm a member, this one seems pretty self-explanatory.Sunday, 3 PM to 4 PM - Making Predictions: Looking Into the Future as a Science Fiction Writer - I wouldn't say I make predictions, really. But there are things you can do to make your future feel more real and believable.So if you're in the Ottawa area and interested in this sort of stuff, come over and see! Track me down even, maybe. Full details are available on the con website.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Brief heat assaults aside, it's getting to that time of year when the birds are soon going to be making their way down south, if they haven't started to leave already. Earlier this summer, I caught a small flock merely repositioning themselves along the edge of Lake Ontario, flying along the shore and headed west. It's really a good formation, except for that one maverick bird up at the top right corner that obviously doesn't play by the rules.Way to wreck the formation, bird.

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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

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Sunday, September 8, 2013

While on my way to LoneStarCon 3 last week I had to change planes in Chicago, since there are no direct Toronto-San Antonio flights since that would be ridiculous. It did give me a brief chance to wander through part of O'Hare Airport between spells of cramming myself into a pressurized tube kilometers above the ground, at least. While there I encountered this skylit corridor that was oddly familiar--having had a chance to consider it, I think they may have done some filming here for Home Alone 2.Though I can't help but notice the thematic qualities of the place as well. Notice all the national flags along the arcade; also notice the American flag that takes a place of prominence at the far end, which is mirrored on the other side. Interesting.

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Friday, September 6, 2013

Despite the issues that are rightly being hammered on around the internet, there was plenty to see at Worldcon last week. One fresh appearance to the convention, in association with the TARDIS control panel from the 1996 Doctor Who movie, was K-9. He rolled around the display area of the convention, greeting passers-by and making comments where comments were to be made.Only a cad would point out that K-9 was actually being remotely operated by the same guy providing the voice.

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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

I'm back after an unannounced posting hiatus, the reason being that I was off attending LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention, down in San Antonio, Texas. I'll have a report of that online later--for now, if you want to know how it was, the most direct summary is "unrelentingly sunny with a high of TEXAS°." Because, you know, San Antonio gets pretty damned hot at the end of August.I did have the opportunity to collect some pictures while I was there. For the first, here's one I shot from the SFWA suite balcony, on the 19th floor of the Marriott Rivercenter as the sun sinks past the Texas horizon. You may notice, looking closely, that there's a structure directly in front of it; a little research tells me that it is the Steel Eel roller coaster at SeaWorld San Antonio, more than twenty kilometers away.

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Monday, August 26, 2013

With GO Transit now running trains on the Lakeshore lines at thirty-minute intervals, it's become even easier to see two of them at once. At Danforth GO, the schedules are coordinated in such a way that if you see one train go through, you'll likely be seeing another one going the opposite direction in only a couple of minutes--assuming, that is, that the "one train" is the first of the two. Here, a departing eastbound train is a rolling wall of green and white as a westbound train chugs toward the station platform.

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Saturday, August 24, 2013

It's been just over two years since the death of Jack Layton, the politician who led his party to the promised land of the Official Opposition but who couldn't go there himself. This past week a memorial statue of him was unveiled outside the ferry terminal to the Toronto Islands, depicting him on the rear seat of a tandem bicycle. There's a lot of symbolism tied up in this one, and really, there aren't very many other Canadian politicians actually worthy of being memorialized in such a way.Thinking about it, though--I have to wonder if whether, at least in terms of image, it was for the best that Layton went as he did. Having gone out at the top of his game, leading the New Democratic Party to greater success than it had ever achieved before, becoming a symbol in and of himself: had he lived, perhaps to become Prime Minister in 2015, he couldn't have lived up to himself. No "transformative" politician can live up to their hype; witness the idea of Barack Obama against Barack Obama in practice.The memorial is called "Jack's Got Your Back," and that can be true now. Jack Layton, as an idea, as a symbol, can't be battered by politics--he can't disappoint the people who follow him.

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Thursday, August 22, 2013

Sure, it may be hot in Toronto now, but everyone in this city knows that at this point in history, summer is strictly a temporary happenstance. The same doesn't hold true everywhere. In December 2009 I was in Los Angeles, a trip which gave me the opportunity to do something impossible up to that point in my life: go to a beach, in December, and not freeze. As I recall, this shot was taken somewhere along Venice Beach. I like the way it turned out.Fun fact, incidentally: this is the 697th photopost I've made to this weblog, and the file name that my camera originally assigned this shot was IMG_0697. What a synchronicity!

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Regretfully, another interruption--I was down with the sickness, which I choose to believe were retroactive symptoms of something I will get at LoneStarCon3 in San Antonio. I'm back now, though, with another photo. Along the Bay Street entrances to Union Station, particularly underneath the elevated tracks, you'll find an array of bike locks for the use of those who pedal for part of their journey. However, some of those journeys seem to have taken a surprisingly long time. How long does it take for a bike to get that rusted and dust-covered in open air, anyway?

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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Things were a bit interesting, transportationally speaking, in downtown Toronto last weekend. As part of the TTC's ongoing signal replacement program as it works to make the ninety-second headways of Automatic Train Control a possibility, the entire Yonge-University loop south of Bloor Street was shut down. What did it mean but, of course, another crush of shuttle buses all lined up in a row; there are seven in this shot I took at Yonge and Bloor, and that's only looking in one direction!From the look of them, though, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the subway shutdown and bustitution was a bit, well, harried. Take a close look at the fifth bus from the front: the one that proudly exclaims that it is a "Univeristy" shuttle, because spelling is hard. I first heard about the error's presence on Twitter well before I left for downtown, but I guess it takes time to switch letters around, or something. Hell, though--this is hardly the first time the TTC has committed an act of typo, after all.

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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

This will be a brief post as I am making it from my phone today. Union Station, the linchpin of downtown Toronto's transit, is currently in the midst of a makeover. The subway station is getting a new platform, but in order to build it around the existing station without disrupting operations, there's a lot of tearing up that has to be done. Some might call it breakage, even.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

I know I'm not the first to post this sort of photo today--Karen Nyberg already covered this subject matter, and considering that she's an astronaut taking photos from space, it's not something I can equal with my point-and-shoot. Nevertheless, I take opportunities as I recognize then, and the moment of sunset isn't an opportunity that I stumble into often. I was only just walking into my apartment with the groceries yesterday when I realized the sun was literally in the middle of setting--a minute after I went out on the balcony and started snapping, it had sunk below the horizon. This is one of the last ones I managed; fifteen seconds after I took this one, it had finished slipping away.

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Friday, August 9, 2013

Given how things have been going recently, I thought it might be instructive to dig into my archive for a photo of Toronto gone by--not far gone by, mind you, but yesterday is no more changeable than 10,000 BCE. For me, some of the differences between Toronto of the recent past and Toronto of the present were made more stark from my time away in Vancouver--there was no gradually getting used to any changes as they happened for me.Take Front Street. When I left in 2010, it was a fair, streaming road below Union Station's graven frontage, busy with taxis and buses and pedestrians and food carts all through the day and much of the night. When I got back in 2012 it was more appropriately "Front Trench," as the ongoing rehabilitation of Union Station has left it cordoned off, split up by temporary fences, and otherwise hardly there at all. It's the same way today.Here, from the archives, is what Front Street and Union Station looked like in March 2010. Remember that? There's actually architecture behind those tarps they've put up!

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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

This is where the Danforth ends. Considering that it's such a major street, it's astonishing, really, how quickly it changes states. The track of the old Bloor streetcar loop at Luttrell Avenue and the Scarborough border at Victoria Park shape the road dramatically, even now; east of Victoria Park the foot traffic drops off precipitously, and many more storefronts seem to be vacant than west of the avenue, and past Warden it transitions into a wide, tree-speckled, thoroughfare that would not be out of place in any suburb on Earth. It ends at Kingston Road without any fanfare--without even a crosswalk, at that.It's a strange way for the Danforth to end.

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Sunday, August 4, 2013

Sure, I may be thoroughly unable to pull in Citytv or Global transmissions with my rabbit ears--even though they can pull in Buffalo stations without a flicker, for some reason--but having a balcony that faces north according to the Toronto street grid and northwest according to the actual magnetic pole makes up for it in terms of sunset views. In this one, it has the look of the sky on fire, or of the Nexus from Star Trek: Generations.That really wasn't nearly as good of a movie as it could have been, you know.

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Friday, August 2, 2013

I recently had cause to sit around in Ottawa's airport, waiting for a flight to bring me back to Toronto--a day before last month's floods, incidentally, so in retrospect I'm glad I was able to come back when I did. The conditions in Ottawa certainly foreshadowed what would hit Toronto the next day, with constant grey rain--nevertheless, the planes must still go in and out. Here, a Porter Airlines Q400 is pushed away from the terminal, and I have to wonder if the ground crew is being paid enough to put up with it all.

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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

There isn't a major city in North America, I think, that doesn't have them--sightseeing buses, that is. They differ from place to place, of course, from the amphibious Ducks in Seattle to the open-topped double-deckers and repurposed London Routemasters of Toronto and Vancouver, but go down a main street on any given day and you'll be as likely as not to find one of them rambling along, creaking with tourists snapping photos of the city as it goes by.Personally, I've never been interested in "tourist experiences" like these--when I'm off in another city, I prefer to do things that don't scream "hey everyone, I am a stranger to these here parts." I do, however, make it a point to take photos of these tour buses as they go by. I mean, I'd probably show up in a bunch of their pictures anyway. I'm only returning the favor.

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Monday, July 29, 2013

It's easy to forget about the effect that air has on photography. When you look out at the horizon, you don't see anything more than small, partially-distinct objects in the distance because the human eye isn't that good at resolving close detail at very long ranges. With a camera's zoom lens, though, it all becomes clear. I took this photo looking east along Eglinton just past Victoria Park, with my camera's maximum zoom--while the foreground looks essentially ordinary, bu the time you get to the intersection, the air's interference makes it look more like a painting.

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Thursday, July 25, 2013

The best way to get to the Air Canada Centre, if for some reason you're heading down there, is rather straightforward: the train. The place is literally next door to Union Station, with Lakeshore GO trains now rumbling in and out of there every thirty minutes, and Union subway station only steps north of it. Nevertheless, whenever there's a big event, automobiles always try their luck in their hundreds, turning the bit of Bremner past York into little more than a parking lot decorated with maple leaves. I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, when One Direction was having a concert at the ACC; tonight and tomorrow that stage is going to be occupied by Justin Bieber, so I imagine it will look like this, except more so.

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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

I came across this taped-up bill offering free stress relief on a glass-walled enclosure next to Union Station a little while back. For those who don't recognize, the face at the bottom appears to be a caricatured version of hizzoner Rob Ford, and a good deal of them have already been ripped off... though I'm not sure how it's supposed to be particularly relieving of stress. I mean, I suppose you could tear it into little shreds or wad it up into a ball, but... that doesn't seem particularly cathartic to me.I guess we all have our methods of stress relief.

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Sunday, July 21, 2013

There are a lot of bicycles in Kensington Market. Unsurprising, really--that's just how Kensington Market is, the same way there are a lot of cars in Scarborough. I have to wonder, though, if some of them aren't left as statements running parallel to displays like the Community Vehicular Restoration Project. Some of the bikes I found locked up against fences and signposts have been there long enough for the local vegetation to grow around and through them, the leafy answer to a tree growing around a chain-link fence. So either someone's been planting kudzu along Augusta Avenue, or whoever belongs to that bike isn't getting much use out of it, the way it seems to me.

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Friday, July 19, 2013

When Target swept into Canada like a big, red wave made of bullseyes, it didn't enter an unoccupied niche. It swept up here because it was able to displace Zellers, a similar department store which was a fixture of my younger days but wasn't able to keep up with the modern world. Most Zellers locations were replaced with Targets, and the replacement has been so thorough that in most places you wouldn't even know that it had ever been otherwise.Not everywhere, though. The West End Mall in Pembroke, Ontario was anchored by a Zellers--until March of this year, at least, after which it became anchored by an empty box with a vague impression of its name left behind. With the slow but implacable march north of chains like Target, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Marshalls, there's not nearly as much room left for something that called itself "truly Canadian," I suppose.

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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

I took this shot of the setting sun from my apartment last month, looking northwest across East York, when conditions were such that opening a window wasn't like opening a furnace. I like the way it worked out here, not only with the clouds and the buildings half in shadow, but from the silhouettes of the plane and helicopter that just happened to be passing by. I didn't even notice them at the time.

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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

So: Pacific Rim. If you haven't seen it--see it. It is a movie that promises giant robots punching giant monsters, and by God it delivers giant robots punching giant monsters. I can't remember the last time I walked into a film that was so cathartic, so full of in-your-face spectacle. It makes me pine, in fact, for a world in which our most pressing problems can be solved by punching things. Well, I suppose we do live in such a world, but there is always the problem of being charged with assault immediately thereafter. So it's not a particularly practicable method of problem solving.For a summer movie built around giant robots punching things, though, Pacific Rim has surprising thematic depth. The main themes running through the film are family, unity, and coming together--witness the nature of the jaeger pilot teams, the manner in which the jaegers' mission is fulfilled, and the things that are necessary in order to do that. Behind those, though, there's a pretty strong environmental message--really, the kaiju are a pretty blunt metaphor for climate change.Consider it: powerful forces erupt from out of sight, emerge onto land and devastate cities. The countries of the world cooperate at first and take active measures--the jaegers--to beat back the threat, but as the tide begins to turn, the sense of unified resolve splinters and the leaders choose instead to build giant walls to protect the land from the threat of the ocean; walls that may or may not be finished in time, and which may or may not actually protect the millions of ordinary people on the coasts immediately behind them, while the rich and powerful flee to "safe zones" inland. Remind you of any projections? The kaiju themselves are almost as forces of nature within the movie itself; consider that a powerful kaiju is a Category 4, the same way we categorize a devastating hurricane, and the opening narration explicitly draws that comparison ("in a jaeger, you can fight the hurricane").That's why I have such a problem with part of the film's climax. If you've seen it, you may already know what I mean. If you haven't, wait until you've seen it to read the rest of this, unless you don't care about knowing what's to come.

So, it's the end of the movie, and Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka are marching across the bottom of the ocean to deliver a nuclear weapon to the Breach, the dimensional portal through which the kaiju are invading Earth, and thereby seal it. Things go wrong, because of course they do, this is a movie for hell's sake. The weapon is unusable, and the hero pilot of Gipsy Danger must seal the Breach by self-destructing the jaeger's own nuclear reactor.Oyyy. To put it simply: NUCLEAR REACTORS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. You can't turn a nuclear reactor into a nuclear bomb any more than you can turn a 1989 Geo Metro into a fuel-air explosive.This is a regrettably widespread misapprehension, because some goddamn writers don't make an effort to actually understand how things work--but, hey, I get you. You might be saying, "in a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters, you're getting angry over something like this?" Yes, I am. Things like kaiju and jaegers are impossible; you're not going to have 300-foot monsters in reality, and the idea of building 300-foot battle robots with modern technology is purely ridiculous. I can, however, suspend my disbelief on that point--jaegers and kaiju are the very core of the movie. Since they do not, and cannot, really exist I can forgive a lot of spectacle about their capabilities.Nuclear reactors, however, do exist, and it is not very hard to treat them accurately. Pacific Rim is already asking a hell of a lot from me to suspend disbelief over jaegers, kaiju, a giant wall built around the entire Pacific Ocean... asking enough, really. It does not get a free pass on mischaracterizing something that actually exists.There's more to it than that, though--a rather pernicious "more," the way I see it. It's the illusion-of-truth effect; people are more willing to believe something they've encountered before. Now, Pacific Rim isn't making any kind of statement here--the reason the whole "nuclear meltdown self-destruct" thing was used was because it's a simple kludge for the writer and it's direct. The problem, however, is that it generates another little data point fluttering around and waiting to attach to something. It's another piece of "something that I heard somewhere" that nuclear reactors explode.The kicker is that the way I see it, this runs at cross-purposes with Pacific Rim's environmental themes. What was true in the 1970s is true in the 2010s; when it comes to electrical generation, for most of the world there are only three choices: nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Not everyone has geothermal vents of dammable waterfalls, after all, and while renewables are admirable targets to shoot for, they're still far away from being able to support the brunt of demand themselves. While natural gas has a comparatively low CO2 emission rate, the fracking necessary to get it is causing earthquakes hither and yon, and the pollution from coal-burning plants kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year when everything is working normally.But you don't see Greenpeace standing in front of the bulldozers that the Germans are using to build those dozen new coal plants that are replacing all of its nuclear plants, because it doesn't fit with the common environmental ideology that nuclear is the worst of all things. No, you just see well-meaning movies that unintentionally shore up the foundation that makes that kind of ideology possible.Nevertheless: Pacific Rim is fucking awesome. Go see it.

Monday, July 15, 2013

You'd think it would be difficult to miss--a colorful mural splahsed over the side of a building on Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, centered around a hachimaki-rocking kaiju breathing not only fire but an admonition against parking. You'd think, but people are nothing if not oblivious, assuming they care at all. Whoever was driving that black Mini didn't, after all.

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Sunday, July 14, 2013

I know it's been a while since I put up one of these, and I don't even have any excuse like "I was running for Mayor of Toronto again." I mean, it's not like I haven't been drinking. Hell, there was a time in the not-so-distant past where I needed to drink, regularly. But that's behind me, for now, and what's ahead is another smooth review. For the first shot in 2013, I present to you a beer that's only recently appeared on the Ontario scene, Shawinigan Handshake from Le Trou du Diable ("The Devil's Hole"), a microwbrewery in Shawinigan, Quebec.Some may think that "Shawinigan Handshake" is a strange name for a beer, particularly if you're not well-versed in Canadian politics. For that, let me take you back to those grand old days of the 1990s--specifically February 15, 1996. On that day, Prime Minister Jean Chretien found himself confronted by a group of anti-poverty activists, and reacted as anyone would expect Jean Chretien to act. That is, he grabbed one of them, Bill Clennett, with a chokehold and broke one of his teeth. Perhaps not the sort of thing you'd expect just any politician to do--I mean, you'd think they would have people to choke protesters for them, so they don't have to get their hands dirty--but hardly out of character for Chretien. I mean, just look at the soapstone thing. Appropriately enough, the bottle's label depicts a highly-caricatured version of Chretien executing the famous chokehold on the Devil, and you can't say he doesn't deserve it, either.Now, though, for the beer.

Shawinigan Handshake describes itself as a "pugnacious strong ale," but this didn't tell me much--hell, I bought it because of the name and the political undertones. What it means is that it's a rather hoppy pale ale, though not verging on the extreme bitterness of IPAs I've had in the past. I found bitter notes present, though not particularly strong, in the taste from the start, but as I progressed through the stein (which wasn't able to hold the entire bottle at once--a first) I found that there was a definite hoppy taste building up on my tongue, and the more I drank the stronger the bitter taste came to the forefront. This beer wastes no time in wrapping itself around your throat.The beer itself is bright with a thick head, but I have to take issue with the label's description--the beer claims to have "notes of bread, banana, and spruce," but aside from a vague scent of spices just after I poured, I didn't detect any of this. Perhaps it's time to replace my tongue with some sort of super-capable bionic tongue, able to pick up and magnify the slightest tastes... but I can imagine how that could quickly go awry.Nevertheless, Shawinigan Handshake is a firm hitter. At 6.5% alc./vol., and especially with me not having eaten very much at that point in the day, the one bottle left me spinning for a while afterward. Personally, I wouldn't recommend having it alone; particularly with the bitterness, this is a beer that's best paired with food. Considering its brewpub origins, that's hardly a surprise. Available in 600 mL bottles, you can find it at the LCBO for $6.05 per.It sort of makes me wonder how Harper will be commemorated in beer form. Tar Sands Stout, perhaps?ANDREW'S RATING: 4/5Previous Quaff Reviews

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Hey, I'm the one who took this photograph, and even then I needed a moment to figure out just what the hell it is. What it is is a simple shot through the wheels of the many, many Bixi bikes parked at the station at Front and Yonge in front of the Dominion Public Building, just waiting for people to ride them away to wherever.Perhaps it would've been cooler if I hadn't explained it at all, though. I suppose I'll never know.

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About the Sophont What Writes Here

Hi! I'm a science fiction writer, photographic dabbler, transit nerd, and one of the few to return from the West Coast alive. I've been accused of being a "pencil neck geek" and unsuccessfully ran for Mayor of Toronto in 2010.

You can send me email, if for some reason you want to, at apbarton AT gmail DOT com.

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